George Orwell | British author | Britannica.com British author Alternative Title: Eric Arthur Blair George Orwell Virginia Woolf George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (born June 25, 1903, Motihari , Bengal, India —died January 21, 1950, London , England ), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti- utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. George Orwell. BBC Copyright Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London , appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel. Early life He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs.

His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay , Such, Such Were the Joys (1953). Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Winchester and Eton, and chose the latter. He stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals.

Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “ Shooting an Elephant” and “ A Hanging,” classics of expository prose. Against imperialism Scientists Ponder Menopause in Killer Whales In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer.

Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. British Culture and Politics Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious , and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment .

The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well.

Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist , though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist . From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing. By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness.

Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books. Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan .

At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism , like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn , 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian , decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party . Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm , a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin . In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Dust jacket for the first American edition (1946) of George Orwell’s Animal … Advertising Archive/Courtesy Everett Collection Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism . The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith , is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police.

The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother . Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigour with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “ newspeak ,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses. Trending Topics About the author, George Orwell - Animal Farm Animal Farm Sitemap About the author, George Orwell George Orwell is not his real name, it is actually Eric Arthur Blair. George Orwell is his pen-name.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen-name George Orwell (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), was an English author and journalist. George Orwell He wrote multiple stories including Animal Farm, Ni neteen Eighty-Four, and an assortment of essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense, revolutionary opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism Orwell is considered one of the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture and politics. Early Life: Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, Bihar, Bengal Presidency, British India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who had married Lady Mary Fane daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and he was supported, as an absentee landlord, by a good income from slave plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Although the gentility was passed down the generations, the prosperity was not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class".

His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Burma where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was a year old, Ida Blair took him to England. In 1904, Blair's mother settled at Henley-on-Thames. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit he did not see his father again until 1912. His mother's diary from 1905 indicates a lively round of social activity and artistic interests. The family moved to Shiplake before World War I, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field, and on being asked why, he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up". Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry and dreamed of becoming famous writers.

He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister. At the age of five, Eric Blair was sent as a day-boy to the convent school in Henley-on-Thames which Marjorie attended - a Catholic convent run by French Ursulines, exiled from France after religious education was banned there in 1903. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family was not wealthy enough to afford the fees, making it necessary for him to obtain a scholarship. Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, was asked to find the best possible school to prepare Eric (whose education the family believed was more important than that of his sisters) for higher things, and he recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex. Limouzin, who was a proficient golfer, came into contact with the school and its headmaster at the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904.

The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. Blair hated the school and many years later based his posthumously published essay Such, Such Were the Joys on his time there. At St. Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who himself became a noted writer and who, as the editor of Horizon magazine, published many of Orwell's essays. While at the school Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, the local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington College and Eton College, two distinctive English independent boarding schools. After Blair spent a term at Wellington in 1917, a place became available for him as a King's Scholar at Eton which he took up, and remained at Eton until 1921. His tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who remained a source of advice later in his career.

Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley who spent a short interlude teaching at Eton. However, outside of the classroom there is no evidence of contact between them, with the exception of a letter from Huxley to Blair, penned on 21 October 1949 following the publication of Blair's Nineteen Eighty-Four, wherein he congratulated his former pupil on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years they did not associate with each other. Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a college magazine and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to obtain one. However Stephen Runciman, who was a close contemporary, noted that he had a romantic idea about the East and, for whatever reason, it was decided that Blair should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this, it was necessary to pass an entrance examination.

His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time and Blair was enrolled at a "crammer" there called "Craighurst" where he brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of twenty-seven. Citations: George Orwell - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. George Orwell Biography of George Orwell George Orwell [pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950), journalist, political author and novelist wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); ï¿½It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.ï¿½ Originally titled Last Man in Europe it was renamed Nineteen Eighty-Four for unknown reasons, possibly a mere reversal of the last two digits of the year it was written.

It was first met with conflicting criticisms and acclaim; some reviewers disliked its dystopian satire of totalitarian regimes, nationalism, the class system, bureaucracy, and world leadersï¿½ power struggles, while others panned it as nihilistic prophesy on the downfall of humankind. Some still see it as anti-Catholic with Big Brother replacing God and church. From it the term Orwellian has evolved, in reference to an idea or action that is hostile to a free society. Yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four has proven to be a profoundly meaningful work and continues to be one of the worldï¿½s most widely read and quoted novels into the twenty-first century. Inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin's (1884-1937) We, Blair worked intensely, often writing ten hours a day and even when bedridden with tuberculosis in his last days continued to labour over it. From his essay ï¿½Why I Writeï¿½; ï¿½First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure.

This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.ï¿½ He goes on to say; ï¿½The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.ï¿½ Education and Early Years 1903-1921 Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal (now Bihar) India, into a family of the ï¿½lower-upper middle classï¿½ as he wryly puts it in The Road to Wigan Pier (1933).

He was the son of Ida Mabel nï¿½e Limouzin (1875ï¿½1943) and Richard Walmesley Blair (1857ï¿½1938), who worked as a sub-deputy opium agent for the Indian Civil Service under the British Raj. Eric rarely saw his father until he had retired in 1912. Ericï¿½s grandfather had been a wealthy plantation and slave owner but the fortunes dwindled by the time he was born. He had two sisters, Marjorie and Avril. At the age of one Eric and his mother settled in England; his father joined them in 1912. At the age of five, Blair entered the Anglican parish school of Henley-on-Thames which he attended for two years before entering the prestigious St. Cyprianï¿½s school in Sussex. Corporal punishment was common in the day and possibly a source of his initial resentment towards authority. While there, Blair wrote his first published work, the poem ï¿½Awake! Young Men of Englandï¿½; ï¿½Oh!

think of the War Lordï¿½s mailed fist, That is striking at England today.ï¿½ With pressures to excel, Eric earned a scholarship to ï¿½the most costly and snobbish of the English Public Schoolsï¿½ Eton College where he attended between 1917 and 1921, and where Aldous Huxley , author of Brave New World (1932) taught him French. Indian Civil Service 1922-1927 Following in his fatherï¿½s footsteps, Blair went to Burma (now Myanmar) to join the Indian Imperial Police, much like author H. H. Munro or ï¿½Sakiï¿½ had done in 1893. During the next five years he grew to love the Burmese and resent the oppression of imperialism and decided to become a writer instead.

Works he wrote influenced by this period of his life are his essay ï¿½A Hangingï¿½ (1931); ï¿½It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.ï¿½ and ï¿½Shooting an Elephantï¿½ (1936); ï¿½It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant ï¿½ it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery.ï¿½. His novel Burmese Days was first published in the United States in 1934 and then London in 1935, also based on his days in service. Paris and London 1928-1936 After Orwell resigned, he moved to Paris to try his hand at short stories, writing freelance for various periodicals though he ended up destroying them because nobody would publish them. He had to resort to menial jobs including one at the pseudononymous ï¿½Hotel Xï¿½ that barely provided him enough to eat as a plongeur; ï¿½[A] plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world.

Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack... trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.ï¿½ ï¿½Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) After a bout of pneumonia in 1929 Blair moved back to England to live in East London and adopted his pseudonym George Orwell, partly to avoid embarrassing his family. Down and Out in Paris and London, similarly to Emile Zola ï¿½s The Fat and the Thin (1873) famously exposes the seedy underbelly of Paris and accounts his days of living hand to mouth; ï¿½At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.

Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.ï¿½ A proponent for socialism, Blair now wanted to write for the ï¿½common manï¿½ and purposefully lived as a tramp in London and the Home Counties and stayed with miners in the north. Blair learned of the disparity between the classes and came to know a life of poverty and hardship amongst beggars and thieves. His study of the under-classes in general would provide the theme for many of his works to follow. We read of his ï¿½urban ridesï¿½ and experience with the unemployed in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), written for the Left Book Club. In 1932 Blair was a teacher for a time before moving to Hampstead, London to work in a bookstore.

In the sardonically comical Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) Gordon Comstock spurns the ï¿½Money Godï¿½, materialism, and status, though that which he hates becomes an obsession. Comstockï¿½s political creed soon proves a cover-up for deep seated emotional issues; ï¿½The money clinked in his trouser pocket as he got up. He knew the precise sum that was there. Fivepence halfpennyï¿½twopence halfpenny and a Joey. He paused, took out the miserable little threepenny-bit, and looked at it. Beastly, useless thing! And bloody fool to have taken it! It had happened yesterday, when he was buying cigarettes. ï¿½Don't mind a threepenny-bit, do you, sir?ï¿½ the little bitch of a shop-girl had chirped. And of course he had let her give it him. ï¿½Oh no, not at all!ï¿½ he had saidï¿½fool, bloody fool!ï¿½ In 1936 Blair and once student of J.R.R.

Tolkien student Eileen O'Shaughnessy (1905-1945) married. In 1944 they would adopt a son, Richard Horatio. Based on his teaching days, A Clergymanï¿½s Daughter was published in 1935. Spanish Civil War When civil war broke out, Blair and his wife both wanted to fight for the Spanish government against Francisco Francoï¿½s Nationalist uprising. While on the front at Huesca in Aragon Blair was shot in the throat by ï¿½a Fascist sniperï¿½. In Barcelona he joined the anti-Stalinist Spanish Trotskyist ï¿½Partido Obrero de Unificaciï¿½n Marxistaï¿½ or POUM, the Workersï¿½ Party of Marxist Unification. When the communists partly gained control and tried to purge the POUM, many of Blair's friends were arrested, shot, or disappeared. He and Eileen barely escaped with their lives in 1937. His autobiographical Homage to Catalonia is written in the first person, mere months after the events.

ï¿½Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not laterï¿½some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.ï¿½ï¿½from his essay ï¿½Looking Back on the Spanish Warï¿½ WW II, the Home War Effort, and Fame 1939-1950 Back in England, Blair set to freelance writing again for such publications as New English Weekly, The Tribune and New Statesman. His essay subjects include fellow authors Charles Dickens , William Butler Yeats , Arthur Koestler, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Essay titles include ï¿½Inside the Whaleï¿½ (1940), ï¿½The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Geniusï¿½ (1941), ï¿½Notes on Nationalismï¿½ (1945), ï¿½How the Poor Dieï¿½ (1946), and ï¿½Reflections on Gandhiï¿½ (1949). Coming Up For Air was published in 1939. Blair joined the Home Guards and also worked in broadcasting with the BBC in propaganda efforts to garner support from Indians and East Asians. He was also literary editor for the left wing The Tribune, writing his column ï¿½As I Pleaseï¿½ until 1945, the same year he became a war correspondent for The Observer. Eileen Oï¿½Shaughnessy died on 29 March 1945 while undergoing surgery in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1946 Blair lived for a year at Barnhill on the Isle of Jura. For years he had been developing his favourite novel that would cinch his literary legacy, Animal Farm (1944).

ï¿½On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood.ï¿½ Publishers did not want to touch his anti-Stalinist allegory while war was still raging so it was held for publishing until after the war had ended. From Chapter One of Animal Farm; ï¿½Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.ï¿½ Back in England, in 1949 Blair was admitted to the Cotswolds Sanitorium, Gloucestershire for tuberculosis, the same year he married Sonia Bronwell (1918-1980).

Eric Arthur Blair died suddenly in London on 21 January 1950 at the age of forty-six, succumbing to the tuberculosis that had plagued him for the last three years of his life. He lies buried in the All Saintï¿½s Churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England. George Orwellï¿½s life and works have been the source of inspiration for many other authorsï¿½ works. Keep The Aspidistra Flying, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four have inspired numerous television and film adaptations. He has also contributed numerous concepts, words, and phrases to present day language including Newspeak; doublethink ï¿½the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in oneï¿½s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of themï¿½; thoughtcrime; four legs good, two legs bad; all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others; He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past; and War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Among the ranks of other such acclaimed literary giants as Jonathan Swift and Aldous Huxley , George Orwell is a master of wit and satire, critically observing the politics of his time and prophetically envisioning the future. He devoted much of his life to various causes critical of capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, but in the end what he ï¿½most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art.ï¿½ ï¿½Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear.ï¿½ï¿½from a preface to Animal Farm Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2006. All Rights Reserved. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission. Forum Discussions on George Orwell Recent Forum Posts on George Orwell Why did Eric Blair write under the pen name of George Orwell? - Quora Quora Written Feb 11, 2016 Many authors choose to write using a pseudonym or a pen name, just like many actors choose different screen names instead of their own. Eric Arthur Blair, who used the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.

His work under his born name wasn't quite noticed as his work under George Orwell. The name Orwell is also more of a mouthful, unlike Blaire, which is forgettable. Another aspect to consider is his history before he 'became' George Orwell. He'd already established a lackluster reputation under his original name. So when his publisher suggested using George Orwell instead, Blair went with it - to great success. Steven King is another example of an author using a pen name. Many people know Steven King and what he's written, and the genre he writes. What they might not know is that Steven King is also Richard Bachman. Under this name he wrote books such as Thinner, and The Running Man. One of the most well-known pen names of all time is Mr Ellis Bells. Emily Brontë' wrote Wuthering Heights (published in 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby) using this name because during the 1840s, women authors were not perceived to have the credibility that male authors had.

In fact, women were thought to be frivolous, frilly, and dainty creatures who had no perception of "the real world." Another reason for using a pen name is to explore other genre outside of one's own field. You can find authors that are famous for writing science fiction, but have also written fantasy under another name. Or the mysteries writer that decides she wants to write about the development of dolphins. I use two names, myself. It gives me the freedom to truly explore my world and give voice to my observations. Let me know your opinion. Written Jan 28, 2016 I guess it has something to do with him being part of the English middle class but advocating for working class rights. "Eric Blair" sounded too embedded in the British establishment, and maybe the fact that his father was an official in India, something that he despised (yet imitated in Burma), also played a role. Then came his paranoia over the ubiquitous vigilance of the NKVD, after he accidentally saw himself involved in the tragic downfall of the Spanish left in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, promoted by the USSR itself.

His pen name may have given him relief over being watched by secret services, specially after the publication of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who was George Orwell? Real name: Eric Arthur Blair—George Orwell was his pen name. - ppt download Presentation is loading. Please wait. Who was George Orwell? Real name: Eric Arthur Blair—George Orwell was his pen name. Published by Khalid Prest Modified about 1 year ago Embed Similar presentations More Presentation on theme: "Who was George Orwell? Real name: Eric Arthur Blair—George Orwell was his pen name."— Presentation transcript: 1 2 Who was George Orwell? Real name: Eric Arthur Blair—George Orwell was his pen name 3 Despised communism after his experience in Spanish Civil War Best known for 1984 (Big Brother is Watching You!) and Animal Farm Believed that revolutions failed because those who attained power became corrupted by it 3 4 It uses talking animals to ridicule and poke fun at the Communist regime in Russia. 4 5 In the story, characters and events represent various figures and events in Russian history (remember, the story is an allegory!) Fill out your chart and KEEP IT!!

You will need to refer to it throughout the story 5 6 6 George Orwell Biography - A Biography of George Orwell Biography of George Orwell Biography Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic humour, he would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class." Education At the age of five, Blair was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley, which his sister had attended before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, but he must have impressed the teachers very favourably for two years later he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex.

Young Eric attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," but he did well enough to earn scholarships to both Wellington and Eton colleges. After a term at Wellington, Eric moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Later in life he wrote that he had been "relatively happy" at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary: some claim he was a poor student, others deny this. It is clear that he was disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. In any event, during his time at the school Eric made lifetime friendships with a number of future British intellectuals. Burma and afterwards After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as shown by his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as 'A Hanging', and 'Shooting an Elephant'). He adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. He chose a pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites. Orwell lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in the book Down and Out in Paris and London. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later recounted in the short novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Spanish Civil War Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising.

As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the non-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he saw as the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, abetted by the Soviet Union and its secret police, after its militia attacked the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. Orwell was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in Homage to Catalonia. He and his wife Eileen left Spain after narrowly missing being arrested as "Trotskyites" when the communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937. World war and after Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940.

During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot." Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche. Orwell contributed a regular column entitled 'As I Please.' In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the Observer's war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published.

He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair (b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation. In the autumn of 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell. In 1949 Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin.

Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanantion is the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause - anti-Stalinism - that both supported. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings - or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all at one time or another made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements. Orwell died at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.

Orwell's work During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt." Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a man of the left and, in his own words, a 'democratic socialist'. Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language.

In the essay "Politics and the English Language", he decries the effects of cliche, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line - with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabularly, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," and "newspeak." George Orwell (Author of 1984) Fiction , Politics , Journalism Influences edit data Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist.

His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism. In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause,The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotsk Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism. In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937.

Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause,The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organization (Trotsky was Joseph Stalin's enemy) and disbanded. Orwell and his wife were accused of "rabid Trotskyism" and tried in absentia in Barcelona, along with other leaders of the POUM, in 1938. However by then they had escaped from Spain and returned to England. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. He was a prolific polemical journalist, article writer, literary critic, reviewer, poet and writer of fiction, and, considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture. Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) — they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author.

His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, are widely acclaimed. Orwell's influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues decades after his death. Several of his neologisms, along with the term "Orwellian" — now a byword for any oppressive or manipulative social phenomenon opposed to a free society — have entered the vernacular. ...more George Orwell - Biography - IMDb George Orwell Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (2) | Trivia (8) | Personal Quotes (18) Overview (4) 6' 2" (1.88 m) Mini Bio (1) Born the son of an Opium Agent in Bengal, Eric Blair was educated in England (Eton 1921). The joined the British Imperial Police in Burma, serving until 1927. He then travelled around England and Europe, doing various odd jobs to support his writing.

By 1935 he had adopted the 'pen-name' of 'George Orwell' and had written his first novels. He married in 1936. In 1937, he and his wife fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He produced some 3000 pages of essays and newspaper articles as well as several books and programs for the BBC. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Crook <steve@brainstorm.co.uk> Spouse (2) ( 9 June 1936 - 29 March 1945) (her death) (1 child) Trivia (8) He is buried in the graveyard of Sutton Courtenay church, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, although he has no connection with the village. He had left instructions that he wanted to be buried in the nearest graveyard to wherever he died. However, he died in central London and none of the London churches had space for him to be buried. Fearing that his body would have to be cremated instead, his widow asked each of her friends around the country to approach their local vicar to see if their church had room.

This is how he comes to be buried in Sutton Courtenay--purely by chance. His grave bears just the words, "Eric Arthur Blair / Born June 25th 1903 / Died January 21st 1950" with no mention being made of his more well-known pen-name or even the fact that he had been a famous author. Orwell and his wife, Eileen, adopted a son, Richard Horatio. He provided the British government a list of people he suspected to be Communist sympathizers in the late 1940s. He singled out Charles Chaplin , actor Michael Redgrave and novelist J.B. Priestley . Recorded propaganda broadcasts for Great Britain during World War II that were broadcast in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In these broadcasts, which were a mixture of news, opinion and sparring against the propaganda of the pro-Japanese Indian rebel Subhas Chandra Bose , one can see the ideological underpinnings of his novels "1984" and "Animal Farm"--an aversion to tyranny, anyone's tyranny.

Wrote "Animal Farm" after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought alongside Trotskyite troops in the Republican (Loyalist) forces. At this time (1936-39), Joseph Stalin was deep into carrying out the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, and so any followers of Trotsky were suspect. He barely escaped from Spain with his life, and ever after was a committed foe of Communism, particularly Stalinism. "Animal Farm" is a barely-disguised metaphor for Stalin's propaganda-laced Soviet Russia, as well as his later novel "1984". Chose the title of his magnum opus "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by inverting the last two digits of the year he completed the manuscript (1948). Room 101 in "1984", a nightmarish room where the individual's worst fear comes true, was named after a conference room at the BBC, where Orwell had to sit through meetings he found boring. Two TV series are based on his novel "1984": "Big Brother" and Room 101 (1994). Interestingly, both are humorous versions of his disturbing ideas.

Personal Quotes (18) Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. He who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents. One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. At 50, everyone has the face he deserves. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than of stealing from the poorbox. No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than [ Charles Dickens ]. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. [on British imperialism] Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets. This is called "pacification". [on Stalinist Russia] People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in Arctic lumber camps. This is called "elimination of unreliable elements".

Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. In an Empire of Lies, telling the Truth is a radical act. The child and the adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was 'silly' and 'ought to have known better'. Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet.

It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at St Cyprian's could happen in the most 'enlightened' school, though perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven. See also BBC - History - Historic Figures: George Orwell (1903 - 1950) Historic Figures z George Orwell © Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, 'Down and Out in Paris and London', published in 1933. He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, 'Burmese Days', in 1934. An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937). Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists.

He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books. In 1945, Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell's name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases - such as 'Big Brother is watching you', 'newspeak' and 'doublethink' - entering popular use. By now Orwell's health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.

Question: Which George is the author with the real name of Eric Arthur Blair?
Answer: George Orwell